Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

And so, it was no overstatement to say that the smorgasbords and potlucks had changed everything, turning Sunday from a day of predictable introspection into one of intrigue and hastily graded papers, certainly as far as Bernadette was concerned; Sheila, who had spent every Sunday of her childhood in church, did not share Bernadette’s enthusiasm but enjoyed observing it. She sat beside Bernadette at these outings, quietly troubled by an uneasiness for which she could not fully account, though she understood it to be rooted in distrust, which bothered her, for she did not consider herself an arbitrarily distrustful person. Certainly, she was routinely skeptical in her dealings with students, but that was only because she had witnessed numerous dishonesties over the years; thus, her reasoning went, it would be imprudent as well as professionally remiss to attend to her duties without a measured degree of vigilance. She prided herself, however, on never counting change in stores or asking workmen to put estimates into writing.

More unsettling for her was the fact that she believed this distrust to be mutual, believed that these strangers whose hotdishes and pies she consumed shared her misgivings, though in more generous moments, she understood that it was barely possible to know the workings of one’s own mind, let alone those of a group of strangers, even strangers who, when considered as an abstraction, made up the all-too-familiar backdrop of her Iowan youth. That youth has, by design, become a detached memory — she gave up corn when she was twenty and lost her faith shortly thereafter, and then her parents had died, which made visiting unnecessary. She now thought of her young self as a character whom she had once encountered in a book: she looked back upon her with fondness and a degree of pride, but she felt also that this character, her younger self, had simply ceased to be, had not died but merely ended, the way a book did, with obstacles overcome and lessons learned, the turning of the final page, and then the cover closing.

Perhaps because of the literary overtones with which she has imbued her small-town upbringing, she is fond of assigning the works of Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson, though her semesterly staple is a short story titled “The Lottery,” in which a group of villagers gathers together each year to draw lots, with the loser, the one drawing the shortest lot, being stoned to death by the others, for no reason other than to fulfill this particular tradition.

“What, exactly, does this story imply about traditions?” she would begin the conversation each semester, thinking the answer both obvious yet necessary to the formation of her students’ worldview, but the students, masters at commandeering the question and leading the discussion safely away from the text at hand, would invariably counter with listings of their favorite traditions, each of which began the same way: “My family always…” They would discuss their way through the major holidays without her, comparing notes, a friendly rivalry developing between those whose families always opened gifts on Christmas Eve and those who held out for the actual day. She would go home that evening, shattered, and fall into bed at nine o’clock, but she could not help herself — she felt that her students, most of them from the very communities whose potlucks and smorgasbords she partook of each Sunday, needed to be taught the story’s lesson, and so she was willing to ignore the fact that her teaching of it had become its own tradition.

“They need to learn to examine themselves — their milieu, their beliefs — critically,” she would defend herself to Bernadette. “ ‘The Lottery’ is a parable, and that’s what they’re used to after all — parables.” This was the way that the two of them spoke with each other, with the fervency of two middle-aged academics perpetually engaged in defending the obsolete theories of their youth. They used grammatically complete sentences, always, and when others inquired how they were, they refused to go along with the current convention of purporting to be good . “I’m well,” they would reply in precise tones to anyone who cared to ask — grocery store cashiers and telemarketers as well as students and colleagues. Sometimes their students giggled at this response, and they suspected that the students, subjected to years of careless language, believed the two of them were the ones guilty of grammatical indiscretion.

“Of course it sounds funny to them,” Bernadette grumbled. “How are they supposed to know any better when even their other professors claim to be good ?”

So had begun their brief campaign to correct what they perceived as a grave injustice against the English language. “You’re good?” they would query when presented with this response. “Have you been engaged in philanthropic activities?”

It was not in their natures to press the point, however, and so they generally stopped there, with this rather bewildering question hanging in the air, making further small talk unlikely. Thus, the campaign had been short-lived, though they continued to be “well” with all who still dared to ask.

“Even if we are the last two people in the country using well, we shall refuse to cave in. Actions speak louder than words, after all,” Bernadette rallied, though she rarely employed clichés.

“But well is also a word,” Sheila had reminded her, though she rarely began sentences with coordinate conjunctions.

“In this instance, however, the speaking of it is an action,” Bernadette had countered, and their fretfulness had been abandoned as they debated whether well, in this particular case, constituted a word or an action.

So, of course, they did not blend in at potlucks and smorgasbords, despite their stolid dress, for they carried about them, in gesture and speech, the look of women who confronted daily the signs of steady, incontrovertible decay in the world around them.

Then, at a potluck last spring, they had been approached by a woman with large bones and an authoritative bearing, the latter established, in part, by the former. Unlike most people who approached them at these events, people who enjoyed their meal first, nestled among family and friends, before turning their prying attention to the two strange women in their midst, the big-boned woman approached them with a full plate, settling between them like a colleague who hoped to complain about a new departmental policy.

“Hello, ladies,” she announced. She turned her plate carefully clockwise, stopping when the meager helping of three-bean salad sat precisely at twelve o’clock, and then, perhaps feeling that the unusually large mound of scalloped potatoes and ham on her plate required comment, she said, “Clara Johansson makes the best scalloped potatoes,” adding, by way of clarification or maybe enticement, “All cream.”

“I missed those,” replied Bernadette apologetically, though technically she had avoided them, for she disliked foods that grew underground. “I shall have none of Eliot’s ‘dried tubers,’ ” she generally declared when potatoes were mentioned, to the bafflement of those around her, and Sheila looked at her, waiting for it, but Bernadette merely turned to the big-boned woman and explained, “There’s so much to choose from at potlucks.”

“Yes, that’s the truth, isn’t it,” said the woman. Then, after a pause that, in retrospect, they both agreed had been an “artful pause,” she added, “Anyhow, this is the church’s last potluck.”

“The last potluck! What a shame,” Bernadette had cried out, not at all disingenuously though certainly with greater audible enthusiasm than she normally displayed. “It seems to be a popular event,” she observed in quieter tones.